


Outside Imprisonment

by orphan_account



Category: White Collar
Genre: Community: collarkink, Dark, F/M, Infidelity, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-14
Updated: 2012-02-14
Packaged: 2017-10-31 04:07:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/339709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>What comes of falling for a known thief is not canceled out by falling for a known romantic.</i>
</p><p>Or: the affair's gorgeous until everyone else finds out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Outside Imprisonment

"—you know this case is a demonstration of faith, Burke. The Chinese will have our heads if this division loses track of their elephants again." Hughes twisted his hand outward and flicked at the door, a dismissal as familiar to Peter Burke as the warning. "Don't mess it up."

Neal was waiting on the stairs. He relaxed upon seeing Peter— an agent happy to be entrusted with this case was always a better conversational partner at lunch— and followed easily, two steps behind, as he walked out of the building, sunshine slanting around them.

"I had some new thoughts on our missing artifacts," Neal said. "Have you ever heard of goldbricking?"

"Should I check on you more at wor— why do you know about the case, Neal?" Peter had to raise his voice over Neal's protest, "I meant the con! In reverse!"

He shrugged. "Little birds have a way of getting around the office."

Peter made a moue of distaste that Neal could not have missed. "Certain things should not be passing around."

"It's a crime, those chocolates the probies are passing," Neal said, smiling, the big smile that might or might not be a con smile. It favored artifice. _The best cons make it impossible for you to tell_ , Peter thought, so Neal was probably lying when he said "I'm the best you'll ever see", three weeks ago. He wrenched back to the conversation, where Neal's eyes had narrowed, searching for agreement on his face. "It is, I mean, that they tell me they look up to me, but they won't give me any."

"Neal, you're evading me."

Neal fidgeted, shifting his legs so that one loafer blocked his tracker. It was too obviously done to be a tell. "Is there a point to this conversation? I thought we'd go out, have a nice meal, talk about the case. Thank you, how beautiful," he murmured to the waitress, leaving it ambiguous whether he was referring to her or the hors d'oeuvres before him. His right hand reached up to ruffle his own hair. 

The glimpse of Neal's thin wrist shot Peter back to both of those hands pinned under one of his while he stroked the dark curls arrayed on their pillow, Neal saying "You don't have to hold me to own me". Peter resisted the urge to shake his head like a dog. Neal had whispered, "You own me even when you're not fucking me, even before you fucked over my fantasy life—" he had grinned then as Peter found something else to do with his hands. "You own me, right now." The man under him had looked utterly sincere. _What comes of falling for a known thief_ , Peter thought with guilt, later, _is not canceled out by falling for a known romantic_. 

In the aftermath of What Happened With Kate, Neal had been broken of white-knight romance but never his tendencies to twist and steal. Even when it was around Peter his body was twisting, even when it was Peter's breath he was stealing with his tongue, Neal was devious. But his heart was in the right place. Peter had felt that to his bones. Neal wanted trust, Peter's trust, and that brought him so much joy, complicated Neal wanting to settle with the trust that Peter wanted to put in him.

"I don't... I don't want Elizabeth to know," Peter said. "Unless you're going to tell her too. I don't like this."

Neal had his most infuriating smirk on as he picked at a roll. "Oho, you definitely liked Tuesday."

"Not all of Tuesday."

"All the parts I was in, or under," he said. "Didn't you?" His voice trailed off a bit as though uncertain, even though Peter knew that whatever else Neal had done in their night together, he had enjoyed being there and recognized Peter did too.

"We aren't getting anywhere with this, Neal," Peter said. "Are you coming or not?"

Peter had downed half his tuna, trying to watch Neal and his fork at the same time, before Neal replied, "I have dinner-till-breakfast with Mozzie tonight."

"Dinner until breakfast?"

"We'll sleep sometime," Neal said, smile still plastered on his face. 

"Neal!"

"Go have a nice night with Elizabeth..." He hesitated, for what Peter had no idea. "Let me know how it goes? Call me if it explodes?"

"Hm." Peter stabbed at his fish again and the conversation floated like that, little reassurances now and then, while they ate and let the sounds of conversations around wash over them. From the way his head bent this direction and that, Neal was probably eavesdropping.

They got up together, Neal flipping on his fedora and Peter shrugging on his jacket, but Neal made excuses about a bakery he had to buy turnovers from and Peter gave him permission to go.

"Peter?" he called, half out of the café. "I'm sorry."

\---

Life— Peter never believed in fate, life is what you make of it— moved on while Peter stared at a casserole recipe several days later. His delicacy and precision with a gun did not, apparently, translate to fruit; Elizabeth had banned him from her experimental casserole. ("If this turns out badly, at least I know it was my fault." The wink she gave him took the edge out of her words, turned them nice and comfortable. He had yet to test the depth of that comfort: after a long day football, dinner, sex, and sleeping shored up his endorphins. Certain conversations did not.)

The phone rung. Answering calls was something Peter could do well in the kitchen, but Elizabeth beat him to it. "Elizabeth Burke speaking."

Oregano splayed along the phone in her hand, she pressed speaker and turned to pass it to him. "Why is Hughes calling about Neal?"

"The tracking data is erratic tonight," Hughes said. "Have you authorized any late work for Caffrey? Or anything else?"

Peter hadn't been aware that Hughes had a suggestive voice at all. "Probably," he mumbled. Elizabeth had dropped her herbs in favor of hands on hips, question lines appearing on her face, an I-know-something's-up posture. "I don't think there's a problem. Could I check on him later?"

"If you're sure, Burke." The line cut before Peter got to "good night".

"Peter?" El. Distracted from food, El was watching him expectantly. One problem at a time.

"Hun, I... what do you think of Neal?"

"He's cute, he walks Satchmo, he's great during parties, he..." A bowl spun over and over in her hands. "He's your partner."

"What do you think of that?"

"Are we playing the question game again? You're miserable at it, Peter."

"I just wanted to ask what you thought of us."

The bowl stopped turning. "Are you attracted to him?"

Peter looked at his watch, at the photographs on his fireplace mantel, at the pot of soup bubbling merrily on their stove. "El, I'm sorry I never—"

"Why didn't you tell me? I would have understood you," she said, a dimple in one cheek. "Oh, Peter."

One photograph showed Neal with him, both suited and bowtied, in the midst of a dozen of him and Elizabeth. He averted his eyes. "I tried, but— it never seemed like the right time— and then Neal just advanced it."

"So now you're blaming Neal?" A beat long enough to hear their stove beep. "'Advanced', Peter?"

Peter could play poker by virtue of showing nothing at all on his face. If he allowed it the slightest freedom, however, Elizabeth always saw too much. His instincts screamed at him to do something, anything at all; he leaned forward, tried to kiss the corner of her mouth where a frown was building, almost (not quite) ready for display. She pulled away and the line from her chin to shoulder bone was half in the light and why, how could he have forgotten the way it scrunched in when she was angry. 

"I love you, hun," he tried.

"Not enough to tell me you would be in bed with another man. Even if it's Neal." She twisted her foot against a table leg (as when his cases left him out until dawn and she was half-slumped across a newspaper downstairs, sudoku filled in and dishes on the table, right when he first said "El" as he walked through the door). "Tell me I'm wrong, Peter, tell me that this time I really don't understand what's been happening and I should trust you that you'll be alright."

"It's true," he said.

She started, "You—"

His mind chose to forget how it ended, except that the forgotten pot began to spit foam onto the counter as the door closed behind her.

\---

Everything had to remind him that in the same evening Neal ended his stint as a boxed crook.

Peter lived at the house for a month and four days. The familiarity of a home seemed to have left with Elizabeth; old jazz tunes never replaced the woman who loved them. What remained included a sofa without cushions, a bathroom without soap and four clocks without a sense of time. Peter, who had trusted the regularity of tick-tick-tick during bad nights, finally put one clock into the sink and rinsed it until the space between plastic face and luminous hands filled with water. The second hand moved only once, after.

Three weeks in, he tried to update his résumés. For five minutes he could not find the button to start heating a pan on his stove. The copy function eluded him for another ten while Satchmo nosed at his heels, the dog considered his because the -eaux Elizabeth added to his name had been lost at his suggestion years ago. His famous concentration was still well and running, but it diverted itself with topics he wasn't yet prepared to work with.

"Resigned due to family reasons." He snorted. He wouldn't have hired anyone with a line like that on their CV, would have instantly known it covered up something like his own situation. The two investigations against him created a surreal reality: one was for keeping Neal's leash too close and the other for letting him have too much slack. One for abuse of a subordinate's position to coerce sex and participation in life-threatening activities without protection or security. That was (had been) better known in the office as Neal's jumping jacks on the line of legality, very much his personal decisions against the will of one Peter Burke. The second was for making it possible for him to run. That was also Neal's personal decision against Peter's will.

You had to believe in a dissociated Neal to reconcile these images of him, helplessly manipulated and effortlessly manipulative, but he couldn't tell his questioners to see some shrinks. He thought it best to call everything Neal's fault. Peter had taken blame he didn't deserve to save his subordinates and friends, many times, but he had to accept one view or another and he hadn't shoved that, that on Neal— the stillness of Neal's fingers on his chest, the adoring attention of his eyes even as he came: Neal had given those to him freely.

Peter drew in a breath like laughter. Neal probably treated sexual appeal as another tool, á la his tricks with rubber bands and folded bills and imported lockpicks and God knew what else.

The smell of burning meat drifted desultorily around his desk and up his nose. He got up, tossed out the blackened pork, and started another pan, digging out an egg timer to ensure he wouldn't forget. (Only Neal had used the egg timer, claiming that his cooking required precision. Both Elizabeth and Peter threw food into the right container, turned heat to about the right place, and assured themselves that whatever came out would be edible. More or less, it was.)

Back at the desk, he called Diana and pleaded with her to tell him how Neal was doing. The voice on the phone never flinched, all the way to "I can't do that for you, Peter. You know how it is."

"I do now," he said, then jumped as the timer went off. Dammit: fine last word to say to a woman who called you boss for years.

Elizabeth had him blocked when he dialed. She had left him a message last week: "Stop leaving these notes in my voicemail," so he hung up before the message beep. "I'm done with us, Mr. Burke." Her leaving, with time to settle in his heart, maybe hurt less than the poison in her voice. Even if she couldn't stand him he had loved her up to that day, loved her perpetual cheer, and he had thought he wanted happiness for her even if it wasn't with him. With her tact and optimism gone, he was no longer sure he loved this woman called Elizabeth not-Burke.

The phone lit up again with unlisted number as the ID. He picked up.

"How's it going, Peter? You know where I am?"

Eagerness in the quick uptakes of breath. Peter looked at the speaker holes in the phone and thought that he should strangle Neal through them, or that Neal was already strangling him. "I'm dealing with the mess you made. Alone. What were you thinking?"

Pauses as if someone had put Neal up to it. "Peter, I'm sorry." Click. 

People really needed to stop hanging up on him so abruptly.

"Fuck," he said, for the first time since he learned he was under investigation for the flight of a CI under his supervision. "Fuck."

\---

Outside the headquarters of Fides Security, an old woman stumbled as she stepped off a curb. Peter, walking out of the building, noticed and drew closer to help. He was never sure if it was intentional that she hit him with her cane.

From somewhere to his right came a familiar voice. "Relax, Peter, no one thinks you're guilty."

Neal's shoulders stooped a little, but the suit hanging off of them was grand as ever. He had a cell phone in his hands that caught Peter's eyes in the first second of several staring at each other before Peter rolled his arm forward and up, trying for Neal's throat. He caught skin twice or thrice in the ensuing scuffle and had yet to unravel his feelings about that by the time Neal twisted away, the cell the only thing Peter had pulled from him.

The man shrugged and began a backwards jog. "I trusted you," Peter shouted at the disappearing figure. 

He could have sworn it grimaced, maybe, before turning its back to him and shading back into the big wide world of freedom, where nothing was to tie you down- not your own doubts, and least of all your trust in partners.

**Author's Note:**

> Repost of [this kink meme fill](http://collarkink.livejournal.com/1682.html?thread=2981010). My shipping preferences (OT3) often don't match with I end up writing ;__;
> 
> All kinds of feedback are welcome and appreciated.


End file.
